Vision Troubles Could Be Overcome With Training

It’s no secret that a number of body systems start to decline as you
get older. Between aching knees and trouble hearing, aging can seem like
a pretty raw deal. A study has found that some of the vision problems older
adults experience may be reversible with the right kind of training.

What causes vision to get worse in old age?

There are many causes of vision loss in old age. Diseases like
age-related macular degeneration can cause damage to and deterioration
of the sensitive light receptors in the retina of the eye. Other
diseases, like cataracts, prevent light from penetrating through the eye
so that the image that reaches the retina is distorted and fuzzy.

While
treatments are available for some of these diseases, medicine is still
catching up with the wide array of things that can go wrong as we age.

This isn’t the whole story, though. It’s also well known that certain
aspects of vision get worse in older adults over time even without
disease. As we age, our ability to distinguish between different shades
of the same color, also known as contrast sensitivity, gets worse.

The
sharpness of the image we see, also known as visual acuity, also
declines. While the changes can seem minor at first, they can make it
more difficult to read signs from a distance while driving or to notice a
carpet on the floor that matches the floor’s color. The result is more
driving accidents and more falls in older adults with these visual
problems.

How did the researchers study this problem?

The researchers recognized that loss of contrast sensitivity and
visual acuity probably had more to do with the processing of information
in the brain than malfunctioning of the eyes. Older adults might have
no disease but still struggle to see the world the way younger adults
do.

As a result, the team wondered if they could train older adults to
get better at these two functions by teaching them to better
differentiate between close colors and make out fuzzy images.

To do this, they brought in older and younger adults and had them
train on a visual test for an hour and a half per day for a week.
Participants looked through a viewfinder at a gray screen. In the middle
of that gray screen was a striped patch of black and white, called a
Gabor patch.

The viewer was shown a patch in one orientation and then
shown a second patch. The viewer then had to say whether the lines on
the second patch had rotated to the left or to the right in reference to
the first patch.

The better a person was at the test, the harder the
researchers made it by making the black and white stripes grayer and
closer in color. This allowed them to constantly push each person to
limit of their visual abilities.

What did they find?

At the beginning, the older adults were significantly worse at the
test than the younger adults, which confirmed what the team already
knew. The surprise came when, after five days of training, the older
adults caught up to the younger ones such that there was no significant
difference in their performance.

Both contrast sensitivity and visual
acuity improved in both groups, which translated into better apparent
vision when tested with a letter chart at a distance.

When the
researchers examined the eyes of the participants, they found there was
no change in the way the eye itself was working, indicating that the
changes to improve vision had happened in the way the brain processed
information.

These findings don’t change the course of eye diseases that affect
older adults, but they do indicate that not all vision change is
permanent as we age. The gains seen in this study may translate into the
development of real trainings that could be done with older adults to
stave of vision loss and keep them safer and more independent well into
old age.Source: DR OZ. BLOG